Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  “The twins are here… I'll have to call you back. “

  A couple of times, the girls would later say, Mary Kay held the phone up to Audrey's little round face.

  “Yeah, do you want to hear her?”

  Those calls were more important than the others were, though they were often quite brief. Mary Kay didn't want to leave the house, partly because of the media mob, but also because she didn't want to miss any phone calls.

  “She had her phone in her hand at all times. All of the diapers were around her, the remote control and caller ID in her hands the whole time.”

  How much had her great-grandchildren really seen of their mother's relationship with her sixth-grade student? It was a question Nadine had asked herself time and time again. She worried and wondered. She knew that Stevie, Jr., was certainly old enough to figure out what had been going on. In fact, she knew from conversations with Steve and Sharon that the boy had been out with his mother and Vili in the van at night.

  “For a cover,” she surmised later of Mary's insistence that her oldest accompany her and Vili on their nighttime excursions. “If Steven had questioned it, 'I had Stevie, Jr., with me, what could be going on?' ”

  A telephone conversation between Sharon and Nadine confirmed Stevie, Jr., was not the only one who knew what was going on.

  As Sharon told it, Mary Claire burst into tears one day as she sat at her grandmother's kitchen bar.

  “What's the matter? Did Grandma say something to hurt your feelings?”

  The girl continued to cry. “I love my mom,” she said. “But I don't want to love her because I know that she did bad things and I don't like what she did. But I'm supposed to love her because she's my mom. I saw her and Vili in bed together.”

  Sharon Hume was devastated by the disclosure.

  “What was I going to tell the child?” Sharon said to her mother, Nadine. “We know your mom did wrong, but your mom is sick. We just have to wait to see how things turn out.”

  Later, Steve Letourneau's grandmother learned through his girlfriend Kelly Whalen that Stevie, Jr., saw his mother and Vili in the shower, but kept his mouth shut.

  “She probably threatened him,” the grandmother said later.

  Later Nadine recalled a photograph that had been taken of the Letourneau children not long after they were separated from their mother. The great-grandmother didn't recognize Stevie and asked a family member who the boy was.

  “Oh, my God, he looks like a zombie. He looks so withdrawn and pathetic. Couldn't believe it. It was Steven.”

  And as the weeks passed, cracks the size of the Grand Canyon emerged when it became apparent that things had been very ugly in Steve and Mary Kay's household. As if the sex stuff wasn't bad enough, Nadine learned there had also been physical violence. And while no woman deserved to be hit, if there was one who did, as Nadine viewed it, Mary Kay was a good candidate. Steve's grandmother wouldn't put up with any man backhanding her, but she felt Steve had done the right thing because he told her that he had no choice.

  His story was that he was defending Mary Claire.

  “He said the only time he ever laid a hand on her was when she was seven months pregnant and he shoved her because she was going to hit Mary Claire. 'You aren't laying a hand on her,' he said. She said, 'That's my child and I will if I want.' 'No, you won't.' He grabbed her by the arm and he shoved her back on to the davenport.”

  Steve, of course, didn't tell his grandmother about the purported altercation with the van in the driveway, the holes he allegedly punched in the walls.

  Chapter 53

  NOTHING STEAMED MARY Kay more in the summer of 1997 than the visits with the psychologists who were trying to figure her out. Picking apart her brain, reexamining her childhood, dissecting her marriage. The whole concept of the treatment was absurd. She thought one woman used “brainwashing” and “concentration camp” techniques as she “tried to break me down to nothing.”

  “These people aren't helping me any,” she told Amber and Angie Fish one afternoon when they were at Normandy Park helping her with Audrey. “I know what's good for me.”

  The treatment provider in Federal Way was particularly cruel. She reminded Mary Kay of Steve's mother with brown hair.

  “She's the biggest bitch I've met in my life,” Mary Kay said.

  Amber felt sorry for Mary Kay. The way she had described some of the psychologists made them seem harsh and indifferent. Mary Kay needed understanding, not judgment.

  “She said they were really cold and impersonal and she didn't like talking to them at all. So I felt bad that she had to go through that,” she said later.

  Angie later remembered how Mary Kay railed against the whole process.

  “They were trying to feed her the right things to say and she didn't want to say the relationship was wrong. She hated it. She really believed she was right and the evaluators were telling her that she was wrong and it made her mad. She was really stubborn and wouldn't agree with them,” the teenager recalled.

  Mary Kay also hated the idea that Audrey couldn't come with her. Because of the nature of the child rape charges, she was ordered never to be alone with any of her children. No one expected her to molest her baby, but a rule was a rule. Mary Kay didn't care.

  “I'll show them,” she said in what had become typical defiance. “I'm going to bring her anyway.”

  One time she called the Fish twins from Federal Way and asked them to come to the evaluator's office. She had Audrey with her and the psychologist insisted that she be in someone else's care during their session. When the girls arrived and got Audrey, Mary Kay rolled her brown eyes.

  “I'm trying to prove a point,” she said. “I should be able to bring my baby with me.”

  The Fish twins understood Mary Kay's loyalty to her romance with Vili, but neither could understand why she wouldn't go along with the program in order to avoid incarceration.

  Neither did the twins know how far her defiance of the program had gone.

  “This little boy you've accused me of raping? Well, he's out in the car waiting for me and we're going to go off somewhere and do whatever we want to do,” Mary Kay had wanted to blurt out during one treatment session, as she later told a friend.

  The treatment providers pissed off Mary Kay. She thought they were mean-spirited and didn't care about anything but categorizing her as a pervert. They had stripped her down to the core. They had probed in every area of her sexual background so deeply that Mary Kay told a friend she thought she had detailed every sexual experience she'd ever had. They wrote it all down, shook their heads, and told her she was a sick woman. According to what Mary Kay told friends, the whole process was built on humiliation.

  “You're going to admit what a sick woman you are!”

  “You are going to tell your children that you're a pedophile!”

  “If you see—even a picture—of a child, you'll report it!”

  One time a woman carrying her baby arrived in the waiting room while Mary Kay sat until she was called in for her appointment.

  “They told the lady she had to leave the room because Mary Kay was a sex offender and might hurt her child. To a woman who was carrying her infant, for God's sake,” a friend recalled.

  Mary Kay knew she was in trouble. The SSOSA program of treatment might keep her out of prison, but it was not a Cakewalk by any means. Some alternative. She was trying to do what they wanted her to do, but her feelings for Vili hadn't changed. They weren't going to.

  “Everything that she did just incriminated herself further and further and it gave the prosecution more ammunition against her. They were just telling her to do things that were doing nothing but burying her deeper,” said Michelle Jarvis a year later.

  But Mary Kay told them repeatedly that she would rather go to jail than sit through the evaluations.

  That's really stupid, Angie thought.

  Chapter 54

  ANGIE AND AMBER thought healer Leslee Browning was a bit of a bus
ybody, but she cut such a peculiar figure—all bells, spangles, and moonbeams—they couldn't hate her. All they could muster was a bit of eye-rolling and annoyance. Leslee, with her spiky, reddish “do,” reed-thin legs, oversize eyeglasses, and deep, smoky voice, was well-known by folks at Carriage Row.

  “She's the daughter of that 'natural products' gal, Natalie. You know, the one with the pots of plants storm-trooping out her front door.”

  Leslee Browning was in her mid-forties when she reconnected to Mary Kay Letourneau. The gossip line at Carriage Row had been rife with recollections and innuendo since it first became news that a former resident, a pretty, young mother of four, had lost her job as a schoolteacher by having an affair with one of her students.

  Lines were drawn in a hurry. The Bendixes worked with Steve at Alaska Airlines and held down the side for the northern-exiled baggage handler; most of the women in the complex—including Leslee—were firmly in Mary's corner.

  For Leslee Browning, however, Mary Kay was a woman of contradictions.

  She was guarded and cold and effusive and outgoing.

  “But I don't mean that in a derogatory way,” Leslee said many years later, while fabric and plastic moons and stars hung over her healing room—the back bedroom of her mother's condo at Carriage Row. “I mean it in an abused way.”

  Mary was unhappy with the Catholic church, yet she made every effort to get her husband and kids there every Sunday. She told Leslee that when she became a certified teacher she'd never work for a parochial school, though she had standing offers to do so. She'd never put her kids in Catholic school, either. But after she left Carriage Row that is exactly what she did.

  “I was just floored when she sent those kids to Catholic school. She had been so against it,” Leslee said.

  Even when Steven was just an infant, Mary Kay had a difficult time adjusting to new people, maybe even to the role of motherhood. People who saw the pretty blond mother getting the mail would see a different person in the confines of her own kitchen. They saw the shy smile, the reserved presence of a mask.

  “She did tell me at that time that she was unhappily married and would do just fine without Steve.”

  As the years passed, it surprised Leslee that Mary Kay and Steve Letourneau were able to hold it together as long as they had. Unhappy marriages were a dime a dozen at Carriage Row. Natalie Bates had failed in hers, as had her daughter, Leslee. Fran Bedix, Teri Simmons's mother, was making a go of her second time around. But there was something about the Letourneaus.

  The house was chaotic all the time with laundry strung from the kitchen to the living room like a Maytag ticker-tape parade, but when Mary Kay emerged from the front door she was perfect. From her shoes to her hair, Mary Kay was perfect. So were her children. Leslee Browning never saw any of Mary Kay's children dressed in anything less than catalog-perfect attire.

  All the kids in the complex loved Mary Kay. The Fish twins were often joined by Brooke, Leslee's daughter, as the pretty young mother spread a craft project out on the kitchen table or led the kids on a backyard nature walk. After Steve went off to work, Mary would come outside to play. When Steve was around his wife was more rigid, more self-controlled, soft-spoken.

  When she was teaching, she shared a laugh about her housekeeping with Leslee.

  “You know if I had a student like Steven and could see how they would live, I'd really have to have a talk with their parents—they're being dysfunctional.”

  Chaotic on the inside and perfect on the outside. That was Mary Kay.

  “I think she's highly intelligent, but emotionally crippled. I think she had problems early on and she cracked.”

  Leslee Browning was a healer and psychic and had a business card to prove it. It was in that capacity that she first thought she'd reach out to former neighbor Mary Kay Letourneau to see how she was doing. She didn't care what the media had reported—though it was only the second week in March, there had been plenty of reports.

  Maybe Mary could benefit from having someone care for her?

  The voice on the other end of the line was Mary. Not a shattered, devastated Mary, but the upbeat woman who would spend all day and night on a papier-mâché project and look like a million bucks when she finished it.

  Leslee asked how she was and Mary said she was doing all right, getting along in a tough time. Mary thanked her, and when Leslee offered to come to Normandy Park to give her a “healing,” she agreed to the offer.

  The house was a shambles, just as it had been at Carriage Row. Leslee offered to clean up the place, but Mary declined. When Leslee noticed a hole the size of a fist pushed through the wall, Mary sighed and said Steve had punched through the drywall.

  The idea of Steve being violent was surprising. Leslee had never known him to show any kind of temper. Never. But she knew these were difficult times in the Letourneau household.

  Mary settled onto her pride and joy, the new couch. She caught Leslee's eyes looking at the volumes of psychology books spread in small piles around the sofa. Mary pointed to them and said she had been doing some reading.

  “I think I might fit the manic-depression diagnosis,” Mary said, “so I'm going to look for somebody to diagnose me.”

  “Well, you know, Mary, I think what you need is to get through a counseling program.”

  Mary stiffened slightly, surprised at the remark.

  “No,” she said firmly. “I'll go to prison before I go through counseling.”

  “Everyone can benefit from some counseling.”

  Mary shrugged off the remark.

  Leslee was convinced Mary's reluctance to get help had more to do with shame associated with events from long ago than the affair with the schoolboy.

  She'd rather do anything then dredge up the past, Leslee thought.

  She was also very protective of the baby's father, telling Leslee that she would “not have his name get into the news.”

  You're so smart, but you haven't a whit of common sense, Leslee thought. This is the nineties, we're talking talk television, the Internet city. They're gonna dig it up.

  There were no tears. She was defiant. She had no clue where this was headed.

  Leslee was mystified about Mary's father, not only his advice, but also the very fact that he had been alive to offer it. She thought he would have died years ago. Mary had told her that he had terminal cancer back when she was finishing up her degree at Seattle University. She remembered when her mother, Natalie, and Mary discussed natural products that might help buy John Schmitz more time, or even stop the cancer.

  They visited a bit longer, Mary telling Leslee that she and Steve had talked with their priest, who agreed that a quiet divorce would be the best solution. Mary said that the plan called for shared custody of Steven, Mary Claire, Nicholas, and Jacqueline—though they would live with Steve for the school year.

  “We wanted to keep this to ourselves,” she said. “If it became public, it would ruin the lives of our children.”

  It was clear that she still hoped that the plan that had been put together by the priest would still work out. Leslee didn't have the heart to tell her that she thought it was too late.

  Mary didn't reveal Vili's name; again choosing to preserve his privacy, she called him “the boy.” She said she was close to the boy's parents. The relationship with the boy was real, deep and lasting.

  “Why can't Steve just accept it?” she asked, still supine on the couch.

  Leslee didn't have an answer, and Mary didn't allow for one. She went on to tell her about some writings that Steve had found.

  “I made a mistake in leaving out my journal,” she said, before correcting herself and adding, “But that really wasn't a mistake, I guess.”

  Mary was worried about her children. She told Leslee her sons and daughters were back East with her family. The children were all that kept her from running.

  “If it weren't for them, I'd get on a plane and never come back,” she said.

  Years la
ter, Leslee pointed out the irony of Mary's statement.

  “She said she could not bear being in a place where she could not see her kids. Unfortunately, look what happened.”

  The healing took less than an hour. Mary closed her eyes as Leslee moved her hands slowly over her body while imparting her energy and soothing a broken soul. Mary fell asleep, as most of Leslee's clients do. It surprised Leslee. Mary was in dire straits—“the head of the school of hard knocks”—so that such complete relaxation would have been more difficult.

  Leslee Browning and her mother, Natalie Bates, talked over coffee and tea in their cluttered kitchen at Carriage Row after the healing. Leslee was convinced that there had been a pattern of sexual abuse in Mary's life. Leslee could see it from her own personal experience, having survived sexual and physical abuse from a family member.

  “Mary is the classic sexual-abuse child. Everything she's doing. Maybe within the family, maybe within the church. I don't know why. She was so adamant about hating it… there was something that happened in the church or school.”

  A couple of years later, Leslee remained troubled by those books and the bipolar diagnosis.

  “There's a part of me in the gut that believes that the manic-depression part was researched on her part and she found someone to diagnose her. I'm not saying she's not manic, but it is weird. Maybe she was researching to see if she really was manic, but I don't know,” she said.

  Chapter 55

  NONE OF HER friends were in her position—and none ever could be—but all were in agreement with the idea to dump her lawyers. Mary Kay waffled on the subject over the course of the summer of 1997. She was scared and isolated, sitting on her hide-a-bed in the house in Normandy Park. She didn't think David really knew what he was doing. She told friends that the only sex case that he'd ever handled concerned a father who raped and molested his daughter for six years. And he was basing her case on that, she said. Even so, she felt David's heart was in the right place.